Ander - Part 6: Subchapter 51
51
The meat exploded into a chaotic frenzy of noise. Truth be told, Banno had almost forgotten they were there, but now they were screaming for blood.
"The Foxes did this!?"
"Unacceptable!"
"It's just like Shekka-Kai said! It's a curse! A curse!"
Yes. This was good. He could work with this. All he needed to do was get the right tone, the right emotion. He was so tired of pretending, but this would be the last time. The last. Damn. Time.
Banno stood up and lifted his eyepatch, exposing a droopy eyelid hanging limply over an empty socket, a thin line of yellow puss slowly leaking from the corner. "Ander forced an arrow through my eye and cast me into the river!" he shouted, his deep voice easily overpowering all the others. "It carried me far away, to the other side of the mountain! I was barely conscious, clinging to life when they found me: a gang of merciless Foxes. They chained me up, forced me to work for them like some animal, and when I tried to escape, they cut off my foot!" Banno lifted his leg, showing off his stump with the hunk of wood still dangling from the end like a broken hinge. Wolves gasped in horror. Mother in particular seemed to be on the verge of hysterics, dragging her claws across her face, screaming and crying.
"They starved me, kept me weak. It always felt like I was mere hours from death. They tortured me, stabbed me with spikes of iron, burned me with coals! I only managed to escape that hellish place through sheer blind luck! I wandered through the woods for days, following the river back here. I almost gave up so many times. I kept thinking about how easy it would be to lie down in the snow and go to sleep. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that I still had a family, waiting for me to come home." He took his mother by the shoulders and looked into those blank eyes, a useless gesture, he knew, but he wasn't really doing it for her. "Mother, there will be time for me to mourn later, but right now, we have to get Hezzi out of that wicked place! I don't know what happened, I don't know what he did, what kinds of sins he may have committed without me to guide him, but he is still my little brother, and I have to save him! But I cannot do it alone. We have to go there, all of us together, we have to go to the valley of the Foxes and burn down their homes! Trample their fields! We have to kill them before they come to kill us! They may be small, but I've gotten to know them, and I know what they're capable of. They could come pouring over that mountain like a swarm of red ants at any moment! We have no choice but to muster our forces and charge them down with everything we have, while we still can! We are Wolves, and we are strong!"
A thunderous cheer erupted from the lumps of meat. They jumped into the air, brandishing clubs and spears. It didn't come as much of a surprise that they were already armed for battle, their faces and chests adorned with tribal warpaint. It was what he wanted, after all. For the world to skip all the tedious preparations was just a by-product of his impatience. The rules, though... the rules demanded there be a reason for everything, something to fill in the gap of his absence, something to make it 'real'.
"STOOOOP!!"
That shriek was loud and piercing enough to drive a burning line of pain deep into Banno's head, making him flinch.
It was another piece of meat, standing in the Cora's shadow. It was a mangy little thing, with scars running diagonally across its chest, but what stood out most clearly in Banno's eye was the necklace draped around its scrawny neck.
Father's necklace.
Now, what should he look like upon seeing something like that? Angry? Confused? He didn't give a damn about that necklace or the Chieftaincy it represented, but he knew everyone else would expect some kind of reaction from him, so...
He frowned. It was only a basic expression, but you could never go wrong with a good frown. It worked for almost everything.
The scarred Wolf -
(Wardo, that's his name.)
- looked like he was ready to burst. His face was all scrunched up in anger, with his teeth sticking out and slobber dripping from his lips. Even his fur was standing up in furious spikes. It was actually rather comical.
"What kind of a messed up freak show is this!?" he shouted, practically foaming at the mouth. "What kind of a farce!?"
Banno held his frown in place, and that only seemed to spur the little thing on to even greater anger.
"Yooouuu!!" he shrieked. "Who are you!? What are you!? Barging in here like this!? You're supposed to be dead!"
"I am not dead," Banno said calmly.
"You are dead! You are dead! You are dead!" Wardo screeched back, the exact opposite of calm. "What do you think you're doing, coming back here, telling my people what to do!? My children! My sons and daughters! My warriors! They're not yours! They're mine! I have worked too hard, done too much, to simply roll over and let you take it all away from me!"
A searing burst of pain tore through Banno's head, a line of red inside the black, broken and sharp and covered in splinters, like an arrow. Warmth bloomed behind his eyepatch and slowly ran down his cheek in a wet line.
"Excuse me for a moment, Mother," Banno said, giving her a gentle pat on the head. "There's something I need to take care of real quick."
He took a single step forward and the screamer known as Wardo took three steps back.
"I'm warning you! I have power! I have real power! Power you could never understand! Power your stupid father never even knew existed!"
"Speaking of Father," Banno said, casually walking closer. "What are you doing with his necklace?"
"This is _my_necklace!" Wardo slapped it, making the teeth and claws rattle against his scrawny chest. "I earned it! I am your Chieftain now, and I command you to back off!"
Pain was just a feeling. It was no different from the pressure of a handshake or the warmth of the sun or the crisp wetness of river water flowing down your throat. It was just another part of him, but even so, Banno could not remember feeling pain quite as intense as this. It was... getting hard to think of anything else. Every time he tried to imagine Valery's smiling face, he saw Wardo's instead, only... it wasn't really a 'face' at all. It was more like... a lack of a face.
Banno shook his head, but that only made the pain worse, which in turn made his anger worse. "You? Chieftain? No, Wardo, I believe you are mistaken. You see, my father was the real Chieftain, but now that he's dead, his title is supposed to go to his eldest son."
"No!" Wardo shook his head hard enough for little beads of slobber to fly from his lips. "You were dead! You have no claim!"
"I wasn't dead, I was merely elsewhere."
"No! You can't do this! Your father may have been Chieftain in the past, but his time is over! This is my time! I'm the Chieftain now, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it!"
"No?" Banno kept walking, not caring about the flashes of cold in his stump, not caring about the bursts of pain rocking his head, not caring about any of it, and Wardo kept skittering backwards like an insect, muttering to himself.
He suddenly brightened and took on a defiant pose, pointing at him with a finger that shook only slightly. "Are you challenging me, Banno?"
"I don't care about any challenge."
"Because if you are, I must warn you, I have the support of the entire tribe! These Wolves, my children, will lay down their lives to protect me, to ensure that my rule continues, because, like any good father, I know what is best for them! They know I can give them exactly what they want! They know I can make their hunger and thirst go away! That is something your father could never do, and it is something you could never do!"
"I don't care." Banno was closing the distance. Every step he took brought him closer to this feeble little wretch.
"Think about this, Banno! You are making a huge mistake! If you stand down, if you let me do what I need to do, what everyone needs me to do, I can give you your revenge! Don't you want that? Don't you want to get back at the Foxes who did this to you?"
"I am quite capable of doing that without your help."
Wardo's expression curdled. "Fine then. You want to challenge me so badly? You want to rip away everything these people have worked so hard for? Those Foxes must have done a number on your head, Banno! Just look at yourself! You've only got one foot, for crying out loud! Your eye's gone! You're all chopped up! You are in no condition to fight anyone!"
"I don't care."
"Are you insane!?"
"Are you real?"
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